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Alright, well, I'm nervous and excited and everything like I always am when this happens.
I got Dr. Ron Paul on the line.
Welcome back to the show.
Sir, how are you?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show, everyone.
You know Dr. Paul.
Greatest congressman ever.
Greatest presidential candidate ever, if you ask me.
Did two great speaking tours on behalf of peace and liberty back in 2008 and 2012.
Runner for president.
Wrote a bunch of books, including In the Fed, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, and Swords into Plowshares is the most recent one, which is just great.
Of course, today is the 10th anniversary of the big showdown with Rudy Giuliani.
Now, I'm not going to make you sit through all of this, sir, but I want to play a little bit of this clip.
Prevention was a major contributing factor.
Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?
They attack us because we've been over there.
We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years.
We've been in the Middle East.
I think Reagan was right.
We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
So, right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican.
We're building 14 permanent bases.
What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico?
We would be objecting.
We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.
Are you suggesting we invited the 9-11 attack, sir?
I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.
And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.
They have already now, since that time, have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.
Wendell, may I make a comment on that?
That's really an extraordinary statement.
That is an extraordinary statement as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.
I don't think I've ever heard that before.
Now, I have to stop it there to let you know, sir, that at my apartment that night, at this point, my friend Mike stood up, and his face was as red as blood or fire, maybe, and I thought there was terrible curses being hurled, and I could have sworn he was going to grab my TV and throw it right out the window.
It's a miracle that he didn't, but he let Giuliani continue here.
Oh, he said, what he said that wasn't a cuss was, that's not what he said!
...before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11.
And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that.
Congressman?
Now, this part, of course, in my apartment, we're just on the edge of our seats, absolute pins and needles, oh my God, what's he going to say, what's he going to say?
And, of course, any other politician in all of world history would have backed down before Rudy Giuliani and would have said, oh, no, I'm sorry, please, I didn't mean that.
But you responded.
I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback.
All right, and then the rest is history, of course.
That was the moment you won the polls all that night.
Boy, you must have felt lonely up there.
But you won all the polls that night, and then that was it.
There's an entire documentary called How Ron Paul Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty, and it's such a great documentary, I'm sure you've seen it, and it shows this is the moment, this was what made the difference.
Finally, someone, one man, in all of Washington, D.C., was honest and told the truth about who started the war and what happened there.
And millions and millions of people were won over to your message of peace and freedom virtually in that instant.
So, I guess, first of all, thank you.
And then, I guess, secondly, can you tell us a little bit about what that moment was like for you up there, sir?
Well, for me, personally, it wasn't as dramatic.
I mean, it was important and it was challenging, but it wasn't as dramatic as the people who were watching it, you know.
And because over the many years of what I was doing in Washington and saying and promoting was always challenging the status quo, I just figured, well, this is a routine operating procedure.
Why shouldn't I expect them to react exactly this way?
So, I was, in a way, neither angry or upset or what, and I thought, well, obviously, the crowd was much more for Giuliani, and so I assumed that this would be a routine reaction.
But you recall Kent, our campaign manager, Kent Snyder at the time, after we walked off the stage, we were walking together, and he came up to me and he said, guess what?
You're winning all the polls.
And that was the first time that I realized there was a significance there because, you know, the polls and the stations, you know how Fox would rig the polls against me.
So it was a time where, sort of, if anything, after I stopped to think about it, it sort of gave me a little bit of hope that, you know, the world isn't quite as bad as we might think.
And that's one of the reasons why I have remained to be optimistic that there are people out there that will join us in this cause of peace and prosperity and liberty, but they have to hear the message, and that's our biggest challenge because there's so much propaganda and so much control.
And even back then, especially in 2007, I was not very much involved with the Internet and didn't understand it.
And yet today, you know, I have my own program on a daily basis on the Internet, so we reach a lot of people.
But then it dawned on me that we don't have to depend on Fox and CNN and MSNBC because they're all the same.
You know, they're all for war, and none of them came to my defense, so that is what I expected, just as in Washington, the Republicans and Democrats represent one party.
But to me it was enlightening and encouraging, and it's always nice to find out you have some friends out there that happen to agree with what you're trying to do.
So I was, you know, very pleased.
Right.
Yeah, and I'm sorry I left that out of your bio there.
It's ronpaullibertyreport.com for your great show with Dan McAdams, the Great Daily Show, and of course, as is my preference, always putting foreign policy first.
Very important stuff there daily.
Now, at the time, I went immediately and I rushed to write up this article at antiwar.com.
It's called, For Those Interested in Facts, They Hate Our Foreign Policy, and it's my big defense of you.
And I was, like, in a panic.
Oh, my God, we've got to defend Ron.
But then it turned out that I didn't need to defend you, that everybody who heard you, I mean, other than the people who were most firmly invested in the deception, they knew that you were right.
They knew that it was true.
I mean, what did you say other than, come on, guys, you remember the 1990s, the first Gulf War, the Clinton years, we're bombing them.
As you said, at that point we'd been bombing them for more than 10 years.
Everybody just knew that that was right.
And the way I've always put this, because there's such an important lesson here, I don't know if I really follow it as well as I should, but I think what really happened there in essence, sir, was that you gave people a permission slip that they could be antiwar without changing any other part of their identity.
If antiwar means Susan Sarandon and Jane Fonda and Michael Moore, then I'm not that, I guess, size the entire right half of American society.
But then here comes little old Ron Paul, Republican congressman from Texas, white and Protestant, and I mean this in the nicest way, sincerely, the most square sort of personality, married to your high school sweetheart, scandal-free in all that sense, all the grandkids and everything, perfect postcard.
And you said, oh, I'm way more antiwar than Michael Moore, forget about it.
You guys could be for abolishing the Pentagon and still be just as red, white, and blue as me.
As you told the Washington Post back then, nah, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
And it just blew everybody's mind that they said, oh, okay, so I don't have to leave my church, I don't have to leave my job, I don't have to quit my softball team, I don't have to stop being friends with my friends, I don't have to stop thinking about myself the way that I thought about myself.
The rest of my identity is intact.
But I don't feel this pressure any longer to be part of the pro-war consensus just because I'm some kind of right-winger.
And so overnight millions of people, tens of millions of people, just snapped right out of it because of you.
You gave them a permission, you gave them the hall pass that it's okay to leave GOP consensus on this issue.
Well, it was certainly an interesting event.
If you'd have asked me on whether or not I anticipated something like that, obviously not.
And sometimes when it's a spontaneous answer, you don't always know exactly what will come out.
But the one thing, listening to it as you replayed it, it refreshed my memory because I didn't realize that I had brought up Ronald Reagan, which was an appropriate thing to do because I had previously mentioned him, I think, in another question that Ronald Reagan explained in his memoirs that he made a mistake about the Marines in Lebanon, and that 243 Marines were killed.
And he admitted he made a mistake, and he came up with this statement that he didn't realize how irrational the politics of that region was.
And if he would have known that, those Marines would still be alive today.
That, to me, is the astounding question that Reagan did come around on that.
Not that he joined us in the antiwar position, but he did have the honesty to at least admit that that was a serious mistake that he did.
And figuring out the politics of that region, we're no further along on that than ever before.
That alone should have made us all cautious, and it should have made all the conservatives cautious because they admired Ronald Reagan.
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Well, you know, you're famous now for having given all these speeches back in 1997 and 1998 during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Notably, you warned that this policy, what we ought to be impeaching him for is bombing Iraq, and that this kind of policy is going to create more terrorist attacks against us.
In 1997, I found a speech where you said, Mr. Speaker, the Saudis are warning us that we're driving their local population crazy with these bases there, and we've got to get out.
We need to take these warnings seriously.
And there are just so many of those from back then, and yet, you know, everybody else somewhat pretended, and maybe a lot of them really were caught by surprise, and it was sort of... it really was.
The planes looked like they came out of the clear blue sky in the pictures on TV, you know?
So even in the Congress, they pretended that history began the day before yesterday, and now what are we going to do?
But you had a good answer, a ready-made answer, just like the neocons had a ready-made answer.
We've got to attack Iraq.
You had a ready-made answer.
You said, let's do a letter of marque instead of an authorization to use military force in an open declaration of war.
Let's do a letter of marque against al-Qaeda.
Can you explain what that is, sir?
Well, in the Constitution, the term is marque and reprisal, that the Congress gives authority to individuals that said that you can, under a legal document, if you carry this letter, that you can defend yourself rather than being the aggressor you're in defense.
And it was mainly used for the high seas, and, you know, there weren't very many federal crimes in the Constitution.
There were only three, but piracy was one, so it was a big issue for the people at that time.
And which probably should go without even the letter, you know, that you can defend yourself, but it actually said that they could defend themselves or go after somebody who has been, you know, molesting them.
So it narrowed.
It means you don't ignore what they've done to us, but you narrow it down and give people authority, but you don't declare war.
You don't draft people.
You don't run up the bills.
You just allow the people, you know, technically legal endorsement by the government that you can go and pursue the bad guys.
Yeah.
And now there seems to be a question, I guess I'm not exactly certain, of whether by definition it has to be privateers and mercenaries who are hired to carry out the order or whether really the point is that the target is specific, that in this case, for example, you could send the Special Operations Forces or the Army Rangers or Marines.
It's just that the target would be this group of bandits, this group of outlaws, rather than the government of Afghanistan, for example.
You know, that is true.
They don't designate that.
You know, see if I can remember the details.
When we had the crisis in Iran, when they had captured our people at the embassy and they were being held hostage, near that time there were some held by an oil, you know, some oil company employees were held.
And I can't remember who the oil person was.
He did it himself, and he probably just did it on his own, but he had his own private little army.
Oh, it was Perot, right?
Ross Perot, that's right.
Ross Perot went over there and he got them back.
And I got to thinking, well, maybe we need Ross, I probably even mentioned it back then, what we need is to talk to Ross Perot and to go and deal with these people.
It wasn't the country of Afghanistan, obviously, that orchestrated this, obviously the country of Iraq, and that's where we went first.
So that made no sense.
It was just an excuse.
That was the neocons taking advantage of an incident to go and do what they wanted to do.
Anyway, they actually admitted, this gives us an opportunity to remake the Middle East.
We've been wanting an excuse for this.
We were waiting for a Pearl Harbor event.
They put that in writing, so it was so blatant.
But yeah, I think Ross Perot had a standard on what could have been used under this mark and reprisal.
Well, you know, I got this book coming out about Afghanistan, and I found these quotes from General Zinni, the former head of CENTCOM, and Gary Bernson, who helped lead the CIA effort in Afghanistan at the very outset there.
And both of them basically admit, now years later in 2016, they said, yeah, I mean, in other words, in brackets, Ron Paul was right.
This whole war could have been over in six months.
None of this had to happen.
The entire terror war, none of it had to happen at all.
They just had a few hundred guys.
They could have rounded them up, wrapped them up, and that would have been it.
Happy New Year, everybody.
And then here we are in 2017 still talking about this mess.
When we were debating in Congress, sort of given the authority to go into Afghanistan, I can't remember which State Department person was there.
I remember he was a neocon.
I said, okay, I don't want you to go in there, but what will it take to change your mind?
How many Americans, and I want a specific number, how many Americans have to die in how many years before you'll say, well, it was a mistake?
I said, how many people, if so-and-so number died in five years, would you reassess things?
I was thinking the way they're going, we could be there five, six, seven years, and here we are, they're 16 years.
And thousands of people killed, not only the people killed on our side, but the people we killed on the other side who never attacked us had nothing to do with threatening our liberties at home.
Our liberties at home was our own government more than anybody else.
Yeah, it is absolutely incredible.
And here we are, as you say in your most recent article at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity here, McMaster and Mattis are pushing for a whole new escalation to begin under President Trump.
So we're just at the start of Chapter 3 maybe here.
Yeah, what a shame.
All right, now, I have to tell you also, sir, well, and this is more of a personal thing, but it's also the 20th anniversary of your return to Congress, which is a hugely important thing to me and in my life.
And I can tell you, I'll never forget in the middle of the night watching reruns on C-SPAN in 1997, and there's this little old congressman from Texas saying, I have some papers here in my hand, Mr. Speaker, from the British newspapers today about how President George H.W. Bush was selling chemical weapon precursors to Saddam Hussein and some even during Operation Desert Shield in the run-up to the war, Mr. Speaker.
And I went, oh, my God, I can't believe it.
And I looked and it said, Ron Paul, R, Texas, at the bottom.
And I just, you know me, I'm from Austin.
I just, my mind just exploded.
I couldn't believe it, that a Republican congressman would dare to, you didn't use the word, but you were basically accusing Bush Sr. of treason in essence.
And in fact, when you first started running for president, I went back and found that speech in your archives, that exact speech in the records.
I think I still have it saved somewhere.
But that absolutely changed my life, and I was already a Harry Brown libertarian and everything.
But that just meant so much to me, and I spent years, I know this isn't really asking a question, I'm just flattering you and everything, but I'll beg your forbearance.
I spent years telling people in my taxi cab, did you know there's one good congressman?
Oh yeah, no, he's great, check it out.
And I would have copies of your speeches, and I would give copies of your speeches to people in my cab.
I was a pretty obnoxious cab driver, I'll concede.
But then my favorites were, one speech was, Republic, if you can keep it.
And then the next one was, sorry Mr. Franklin, we're all Democrats now.
And I just loved these things, and I would just give them to people in my cab all the time, and it was, you know, I was the Ron Paul evangelical.
And it was such a miracle really when you ran for president, because we all knew, I remember talking with Eric Garris at Antiwar.com, as soon as we found out you had the exploratory committee, because we knew that you had one hardcore, dedicated fan in every single neighborhood in America.
But just one, but in every neighborhood.
So how's this going to play out?
What's going to happen?
We had all this potential just laying there, and then once you set that match with the Giuliani speech, that's, you know, what of course turned the world upside down, and helped do so much to get the word out there.
But I just want to tell you, as long as we're doing anniversaries and everything today, that that was my introduction to you and your character.
And of course then I read pretty much all your speeches and articles and newsletters and everything you ever wrote after that.
And I've been very honored to have you come on my show all these times to talk with us and all this stuff as well.
So big thank you, sir.
Well, great.
It's great being on your program, and you've done a lot of hard work.
Just keep working at it.
You're doing great.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, sir.
All right.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
You too.
All right, y'all, that's the great Dr. Ron Paul.
He is formerly a congressman, before that an obstetrician, and now he does the Ron Paul Liberty Report with Dan McAdams every day at RonPaulLibertyReport.com, and they together run the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity at RonPaulInstitute.org, and we reprint all his articles also at LibertarianInstitute.org.
Thanks very much, everybody.
You can find all of my stuff at LibertarianInstitute.org and at ScottHorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks.
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